The Pacific War and Rise of the Church in Guam and Micronesia
R. Devan Jensen and Paul A. Hoffman From a presentation at the Mormon History Association conference at Rochester, New York, on June 10, 2023. Today let’s talk about war—and peace, the transition from Pacific battlefields to sacred temple grounds. The Great Depression triggered terrible hardships in Japan that led the Japanese to seek military solutions, aggressively colonizing northern China and Micronesia. “In the 1930s, the Japanese military capitalized on the [Micronesian] islands’ strategic location, with plans to make them a springboard for expansion into the Central and Southwest Pacific.” Indeed, “the Japanese launched the early air and sea attacks of their Pacific campaign from Micronesia.” The morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese forces bombed the US military in Hawai‘i and Guam (in Guam it was December 8 because of the international date line). Shown here is the USS Arizona ablaze with 1,000 crewmen trapped below deck, including my second cousin Ensign Howard Merri